Not With A Bang

As much of the world breathes an unnecessary sigh of relief that the Mayan Apocalypse did not come to fruition, at least one person in the United Kingdom must be wishing that it had. But unfortunately for David Cameron, he really does have to lead the government right up to the next election and (one suspects) not a second longer.

Rarely can John Lennon's perennial inquiry "And so this is Christmas and what have you done?" resounded more reproachfully in a British politician's ears.

Now, Sordel must acknowledge from the off that Gordon Brown did little more of any actual value, but at least he must have been fully occupied by whimpering, chewing his nails, mopping his nose with a dirty handkerchief and, of course, holding his breath when anyone came into his office looking for him.

Cameron, however, seems to be completely idle. Which is perhaps hardly surprising that he has no money to do anything. If he had an elder sister looking for some quality smooching time with her boyfriend, she would have to advance him the tuppeny bit to get himself down the pictures and take the long way home. Rarely has someone of high net worth been so administratively down on his uppers.

The measure of the situation is perhaps given by the way the government approaches problems these days. Rather than actually read the Leveson Report, for example, Cameron came straight out and said that he was not minded to legislate on it, but would the press please come up with their own ideas?

Faced with tax evasion by big corporations, the government did not actually attempt to close tax loopholes, but instead invited the British Public to shame those corporations into paying up.

Defeated by the complexities of the education system, the government now encourages people to set up their own local schools, and hospitals cannot be far behind. Indeed, if its relationship with the police continues in the direction it has been taking, it won't be long before social order is delivered by posse.

Perhaps not all of this, however, is a bad thing. Upset with civil war in Syria, Cameron wondered aloud who would rid him of this troublesome Assad, but otherwise kept his head down, an approach whose lack of heroic statesmanship is at least offset by a little practicality and humility.

Doing nothing has a virtue all of its own, as demonstrated by the fact that no one at the BBC got into any trouble at all for shelving that Newsnight investigation into Jimmy Savile. Perhaps not doing something is the new doing something.

Personally (and as demonstrated by the thin nutshell pickings of recent months) Sordel feels rather ahead of the fashion in this respect, and welcomes Cameron to join him on the sidelines, where we shout just as much but are not required actually to break a sweat.

Whatever else happened in 2012, we can expect less of it in 2013.

Out For The Count

Like the Periodical Cicada, Marcus de Sautoy is observed only occasionally on British television and presumably at prime intervals. When last seen, in 2009, Sordel's favourite boffin was frolicking on a beach with everyman-for-hire Alan Davies, but now he is out on his own, trying to solve The Code, which is his post-Langdonian nomenclature for boring old mathematics.

"The Code" is evidently all around us, a mysterious and enthralling puzzle that demands our awed investigation. Consider, for example, an ancient standing circle whose circumference and diameter Marcus enterprisingly appraised with a tape measure before sitting down with a notebook to divide the larger number by the smaller. There we go: 3.2 ... the number that underpins all things.

Well, perhaps not. It turns out that the number that underpins all things is not 3.2 but another number. If you can work out what that number is then you are streets ahead of this programme, where the well-meaning du Sautoy attempted to demonstrate all sorts of extraordinary things and failed conspicuously.

From the statistics of a fisherman's daily catch, knowing only how many years that fisherman had been fishing, du Sautoy was able to work out the weight of the largest Dover sole that the fisherman had ever caught. Three pounds, declared Professor du Sautoy. When the fisherman said that his biggest Dover sole had been "three to three-and-a-half pounds" one half expected the mathematician (who looks disarmingly like Simon Pegg's smarter brother) to turn to the camera and say "well, we all know what liars fishermen are."

The problem with all this popularisation should have been obvious at the outset: boring old mathematics works wonderfully on paper, but du Sautoy's attempts to show it in action run up against the fundamental inability of the audience to keep pace with even his most pedestrian insights. Leaning over the shoulder of a flight controller, du Sautoy explained how the calculations involved in Radar depend on the Imaginary Unit. (Go on, click through that link ... I dare you.)

The bemused controller (presumably thinking: who let this guy in here and where's his handler?) smiled with good-natured befuddlement and said that there was nothing imaginary going on in his tower.

But of course there was.

Imaginary educational television: a world where experiments that don't work are substituted for explanations that you can't possibly understand.

Hide & Seek

Occasional readers of this blog may have come to recognise that it is only with great irritation and self-reproach that Sordel condescends to respond to the Pervasive Evanescent.

Nevertheless, the P. E. is always with us, and so it is that I hang my head in anticipatory shame and turn my attention to: Wimbledon coverage on the B.B.C.

(Just be grateful that I am not watching Big Brother this year.)

The stereotypical depiction of an audience watching a tennis match involves the swivelling of eyeballs right and left at regular intervals, and so it is with the B.B.C.: from One to Two and Two to One the audience is invited to pop with the grace of every serve and volley. "Viewers hoping to see the end of this rally should turn to our coverage on B.B.C. Two" smirks the elusive Sue Barker.

Thank God for remote controls, or it would be more exercise than frail flesh can stand.

Worse still, however, is when the entire channel switches channels. You know that moment when a train pulls out of a station and it seems for a second as though the entire world is moving around you? During Wimbledon, that illusion becomes reality. Rather than switch tennis from 1 to 2 they sometimes switch all other programming from 1 to 2 instead.

Try complaining to the B.B.C. about this (go on, I dare you) and your whining, self-pitying epistle about missing The Supersizers do ... The Fifties because Crimewatch has broken & entered into B.B.C. Two will almost certainly be read out on the air. Shortly thereafter, a B.B.C. "executive" will explain (as one addressing a small and exceptionally dim child) that providing coverage of a live sporting event will inevitably mean adjustments to the schedule.

S/he will then go on to point out (as broadcasters have been very keen to do over the last 24 hours) that 12 million people watched Murray's so-called "epic" five-setter. (On which subject, tell it to the Greeks ... they were ten years outside the gates of Troy and knocking a fluffy ball over a net for four hours doesn't compare.)

12 million people can't, it seems, be wrong, even when four million of them are fruitlessly waiting for Crimewatch, two million of them are watching under protest having planned to watch The Supersizers do ... The Fifties and another three million or so are imprisoned by B.B.C. One having earlier thrown their remote controls out of the window in frustration.

Come to think about it, there must be a sizable proportion of the population who can only receive B.B.C. One. That's the only thing that would explain why anyone is watching it in the first place.

Reality TV

So, Big Brother started again last night, which rather confuses things.

For example: "The House this year will be a place for wholly unsurprising twists." Is that the Big Brother House or the House of Commons? "The General Public will lose interest in activities within The House unless they see arguments and intrigue." BB or HoC? "Voters will be throwing people out of The House until mid-Summer, when there will only be a handful of fame-hungry eccentrics left." BB or HoC?

It's so difficult to tell.

This year, the only way to stay in The House is evidently to shave off one's eyebrows and draw spectacles and a funny moustache on your face in permanent black marker. (No, I've stopped playing that game now.) Those who have watched the series in previous years will shrug and yawn at the tedium of watching an assortment of page 3 girls and homosexuals go into a studio very quickly and come out again very, very slowly.

Meanwhile, in the other House, the entertainment value is noticably higher but impossible to keep up with even in so evanescent a medium as a blog. Last night, as the polls closed, we discovered that the Minister for Eating Biscuits had resigned, or so it appeared on Breakfast Time today where the only video the BBC had managed to scrape together of James Purnell was of his conspicuously filling his face while Gordon Brown held forth of a topic of national importance to his left.

It wasn't so much the biscuits that were important to the video, I suppose, but his positioning as Brown's literal "right-hand man". Nevertheless, it was the biscuits that formed the crucial semiotic element of the picture, and I only infer that it was biscuits on which the future rebel was feasting based on the unlikelihood that cabinet meetings are supplied with anything else. It may have been custard creams that he was hitting with the urgency of a man who missed breakfast and last night's supper, but he may have been tucking in to a full thali with complementary popadum for all I know. Whichever, the BBC was keen to show that in that moment of contemplative mastication the future savour of treachery was developing.

Either that, or they couldn't find a better clip of him.

Newsnight, which begins so precisely after the end of Big Brother that a segue is implicit, covered the Purnell story in an extended programme, which would be laudable had the programme been extended to cover the Purnell story. Instead, it was extended to give viewers a preview of Newsnight's forthcoming coverage of the General Election.

That's right: Newsnight is beginning a year-long schedule of activities including: commentary from an American pollster and - wait for it! - three people sitting around a table talking about politics.

Watching someone shave of their eyebrows and draw spectacles and a funny moustache on their face suddenly doesn't sound so bad, does it?

To be fair, Newsnight does have one actual new idea, which is a Dragon's Den style series in which members of the public pitch political ideas to a panel of so-called experts, but that does go merely another step further to adding to our confusion. All we need is Surralan to step into the picture and ... oh ... this just in ...

Perhaps if the editors of Newsnight want to increase their viewing figures by speculating about the future occupants of The House a year out, they picked the wrong House to cover.